Trillion

Almost exactly six years ago, I wrote a post on TechCrunch marveling at Apple’s market cap. The company had just hit $623 billion, which meant it was in new territory: the most highly valued U.S. company ever (surpassing 1999-era Microsoft, not counting for inflation).

Even more mind-boggling is that the majority of this company value has accumulated in the post-Steve Jobs era of Apple. When Jobs passed away, the company was worth a “mere” $350 billion. That was $650 billion ago. That was just seven years ago.

Of course, it has mainly been the products that Jobs put in motion that have propelled Apple to this milestone. Namely, the iPhone. It will go down as one of the, if not the, best business of all time. Some of that was good fortune (the phone makers were asleep at the wheel) some of it was good timing (AT&T needed something to combat Verizon in the subsidized carrier wars), but most of it was just a truly great product. All of us, whether you’re an iOS user or an Android user, now carry around that device’s direct descendent in your pocket at all times. And it’s undoubtedly your most used computer.

And the iPhone truly did bestow a “halo effect” over every other Apple product. This had started happening thanks to the iPod, but the iPhone bolstered, extended, and expanded the ring. It is why Apple became the most valuable company – a trillion dollar company.

So much has been said and written today reflecting back on the time Apple was left for dead. But even far more recently than that, it would have been preposterous to say it would one day be worth a trillion dollars. That number may as well have been infinity.

While Apple management never publicly showed disdain for Mac, the level of attention given to the iPad in the early 2010s likely corresponded with a declining amount of time and focus dedicated to Mac. Some of the Mac decisions made around this time, like the Mac Pro’s design, later came back to haunt Apple.

The iPad vs. Mac relationship started to change after iPad sales peaked at the end of 2013. Management’s efforts to entice iPad users to upgrade proved futile as iPad sales declined from a 75M units per year run rate to a 40M units per year sales pace. While iPad sales were in free fall, the Mac remained a steady ship, not moving far from its 20M unit sales per year pace. The Mac demonstrated a level of sales consistency that management may not have expected given iPad’s popularity.

Apple now finds itself with an iPad business that is twice the size of Mac in terms of unit sales, but smaller than the Mac when it comes to revenue. The iPad user base is nearly three time as large as the Mac user base and is growing by 20 million new users per year while the Mac user base is seeing more like 10 million new users per year. In a nutshell, both the iPad and Mac businesses have found stability and continue to connect with their respective user bases.

I think that’s an interesting and good way to frame this “debate”. It seems perfectly logical (and perhaps even reasonable) that Apple took its eye off the Mac prize when the iPad exploded as it did out of the gate. They may have had not only a “holy shit, this thing is going to be much bigger than the Mac!” moment, but a “holy shit, can this thing be bigger than the iPhone?!” moment. But that explosive start, while great in many ways, as we know now, was misleading.

The iPad remains a fantastic business. But it often gets knocked these days because of said explosion out of the gate before falling back to a (still massive) equilibrium. And in a weird way, Apple created a product that was “too good” – at least from a business perspective. You simply don’t need to upgrade the iPad each and every year.

It’s clear now that Apple made a mistake in neglecting the Mac, and in particular the “Pro” segment of the market. But that chart above, and Cybart’s framing makes it clear why – and why they won’t make that mistake again going forward.

But SoftBank shares currently trade at a steep discount compared with the sum of those parts. The hedge fund Tiger Global Management recently calculated that SoftBank’s net asset value is $190 billion. SoftBank’s entire market capitalization as of Friday is about $94 billion.

SoftBank’s stake in Alibaba alone is now worth nearly $132 billion, or 40 percent more than SoftBank’s market cap. But its stock price hasn’t moved in lock step with the internet company in the way you might have expected it to. In fact, it hasn’t moved much in years.

It is fascinating just how differently these holdings are valued – mark them a discount, sure, but come on – the same used to be true with Yahoo back in the day, which would lead folks to joke that Yahoo was worthless. SoftBank is a lot of things. One thing they’re not is Yahoo. They clearly need to separate SoftBank the business from SoftBank the holding company/investor.

Using new fifth-generation wireless technology, Verizon plans to beam online services to home receivers, delivering speeds that match or exceed landline connections. The company will eventually use 5G to sell consumers internet and online TV packages to compete nationally against cable and landline services from AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp.

This is a lot easier said than done (for one thing, “5G” travels over much shorter distances than 4G/LTE, so there will need to be a lot of hubs around cities to make this work). But it is a compelling proposition both in terms of how the wireless guys can circumvent the cable guys, but also how the newfangled entrants in TV streaming can breakthrough without the cable guys…

Speaking of streaming, here’s Paul Thurrott with details on a new gaming service that Microsoft is cooking up:

Microsoft doesn’t typically make much money on the hardware sales but they do on things like Xbox Live, Xbox Gamepass, and game sales. If Microsoft can create a next-gen console that requires lower up-front payment and longer subscription payments (remember, all games will run in the cloud, so you will need to pay ‘something’ to access them), this is a huge win for Xbox and Microsoft.

The portion of the game that runs locally, some have referred to it as a slice or splice, means that the game is ‘running’ in two locations at the same time and utilizes Microsoft’s cloud to stitch it all together.

The benefit here is that Microsoft’s cloud platform reaches around the globe with data centers in every major market. This makes streaming the games platform available globally but this also likely means that it can run on any type of device. Of course, Microsoft would love you to buy their hardware but the company’s end-goal is that you can access ‘Xbox’ from any device, anywhere and Scarlett Cloud is looking to deliver on this idea.

One person familiar with Microsoft’s plans said that this may reduce latency in all aspects of the game as well. If a multiplayer game is using Azure as it’s central server, Scarlett Cloud console will be closer physically to the multiplayer server resulting in less latency.

Streaming games from the cloud to an “edge” console has long been touted as the future of gaming. Unfortunately, it just hasn’t really worked over the past decade-plus. But Microsoft has a unique advantage here given all the resources poured into their Azure Cloud over the years, and the scale at which it operates now. What if after years of being beaten badly by Sony, they rise up out of seemingly nowhere for the final finishing move? It doesn’t sound that crazy.

Casey Johnston has a clever, but simple idea that could go a long way towards ending the Twitter Edit Button debate:

I think we can find a happy medium here. There is a feature in Gmail that allows users to unsend emails. But it is not really unsending them; it’s just holding them for about seven seconds after you hit send, because that is the window where you inevitably discover you made a typo, or forgot something you wanted to say, or realize maybe the response you were about to give didn’t need to be given at all.

How many bad tweets, if we were given seven seconds to rethink them, would never see the light of day? How many fewer typos would we make? How much less identity-driven keening would be added to every tempest in a teapot, a new one of which crops up about every 10 minutes on the TL? Probably a lot.

One bit of pushback is that this would make Twitter less “real time”, which is true, but I honestly wonder how many people would even notice? You could also backdate the timestamp if the tweet does pass the 7-second threshold for those jokers who simply must be FIRST.

“For younger travelers especially, the days of printed phrase and point-it books are over,” said Joss Moorkens, an assistant professor at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. “That is significant: As people become more familiar with mobile translation tools, they are more likely to be willing to engage with visitors despite the lack of a common language.”

That, certainly, is the Google vision of what its app can do. Ms. Cattiau said the company’s “ambition and vision is breaking language barriers for people in many different ways,” and in many different contexts, not simply tourism. Some 95 percent of Google Translate users are outside the United States, often in multilingual countries such as India and Indonesia.

As someone who travels quite a bit internationally, I’m constantly still blown away each time I use Google Translate. It’s one of those things that just makes it feel like your smartphone is actually a magic wand. Now if they can just make those ear buds even just halfway decent…